Tom King believes he could have become Garda Commissioner if he had decided to stay in the force. "People have said to me, `It's there for you.' But it's one thing to say you can be Commissioner tomorrow. It's another to say if you live long enough, and the politics are right, you could be Commissioner in six years."
As the high-profile Assistant Commissioner for Dublin, Mr King would be well placed for the top job. He is assertive enough and, at 51, young enough to make the grade when the current Commissioner retires.
But he is impatient. Retiring on a pension of half his £51,000 annual salary, having completed his 30 years' service in the force, Mr King is heading for a management job in the private sector.
He says he needs a challenge, and he has had a number of offers from businesses. The only one which has become publicly known is an offer from Dunnes Stores, although he will not confirm that he will accept it.
Asked what he feels about the history of employee relations at Dunnes, he is quick to defend the supermarket chain: "When they opened a new stores in Thurles, shopkeepers all over the town were complaining because they were losing their staff to Dunnes."
If he takes an executive role - and he says it is management rather than security consultancy he wants - he can expect to earn well over £100,000 a year. His pension will add £25,000 a year more.
In the Garda Mr King was widely seen as intensely ambitious, and a man with a well-developed ego. But despite these considerations, and his sometimes abrasive style, there is genuine disappointment among senior gardai at the loss of one if the force's more progressive thinkers.
"We can't afford to lose him," said one. "There are not enough like him".
Mr King believes one of his main achievements as assistant commissioner in Dublin has been restoration of a relationship between the force and the community.
He took the job almost two years ago at a time when policing in the capital seemed to be growing increasingly remote from many of its residents. "There were places we didn't go into, unless it was in a van with grilles on the windows," says Mr King.
He traces that state of affairs back to changes in the Garda in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
"Two things happened then. The so-called Troubles broke out in Northern Ireland and had a big effect on the force here. Officers were needed for the Border, and for security duties. Special Branch was beefed up and there had to be protection for judges and politicians and so on."
The second was a change in Garda working patterns in 1970, with the introduction of a 40-hour week and a resting day following every three shifts. "Snap! Just like that, we lost 25 per cent of our strength."
In addition the Garda "mechanised, motorised and modernised". Radios and more cars made officers increasingly remote from the people they policed.
Inevitably the Garda became more a "fire-brigade service" than a community police force, according to Mr King.
"We were certainly a fire-brigade effort in the flats complexes. And we `lost' the kids growing up. We grew apart. And the guards just weren't there when a big crisis came along - like drugs obviously. We didn't have a bond of strength with the community to get through it."
The lack of a bond became obvious over the last two years with gardai trailing along behind drug marches in Dublin, watching people police themselves.
"Obviously there was a vacuum, and someone will always step in to fill a vacuum, and I thought it better be us."
Mr King says he saw Operation Dochas (hope), a plan to increase visible patrolling and chase drug dealers off the street, as an opportunity to re-establish links with the community.
"Drugs was the super-ordinate goal for us and the community, and with that issue - by that vehicle - we could get to know each other."
One thing the Garda had to do was view the city as its citizens do, he says.
"There's no such community as `the north inner city'. There's dozens of small communities, each with their own concerns."
The Garda had to create a policing plan for each, with goals agreed between local officers and community leaders.
Another priority was to make sure the same officers policed the same streets each day. Previously a garda would not know which area of his district he would be working in on any given day.
"I decided that nominated, named gardai would be assigned particular areas - say Temple Bar, or North Earl Street - and every day they came in to work, they would know that is where they would be working. They had to get to know the people, because they'd face the same problems there today that they left behind yesterday."
Some members of the force were sceptical of the plan a year ago, but now see the value of it, he says.
Ideally, he would like representatives of all agencies - the Garda, social and health services, Dublin Corporation - to be available in "a one-stop shop within the community, where the people live, not in some grand office somewhere else."
Mr King was criticised earlier this year when he said O'Connell Street had little more than one crime a day, at a time when retailers thought they were suffering a crimewave. "I was right then, and I'm still right," he says.
His point was that there was little crime on the street; most was within private premises.
"Look at Grafton Street: 19 per cent of crime on the street, 81 per cent in shops and restaurants. Detectives can be in shops and premises sometimes with agreement, but really we can't patrol in there."
O'Connell street is now relatively heavily policed by officers, especially at times of potential trouble, when pubs and nightclubs are emptying.
Mr King has been in the Garda since 1965, when he was posted to Dalkey after training in Templemore. At first he was on foot, then given a motorcycle.
In 1970 he applied to join the Special Branch. "I was interviewed by three chief superintendents. They must have had nothing to do in those days."
For the next 11 years he was "up to my neck in anti-subversive duties". Highlights included the attempted rescue of Dr Tiede Herrema when he and his kidnappers, Eddie Gallagher and Marion Coyle, were found hiding in a house in Monasterevin in 1975.
Mr King was among a group of armed detectives searching houses in the estate when they finally came to the right door.
"We broke it down and burst in. They went into an upstairs bedroom at the front and Gallagher broke the glass. We were downstairs, listening to him above firing shots out the front."
The detectives retreated and both sides settled into the 17-day siege which ended with the release of the Dutch industrialist.
He was promoted from detective sergeant to detective inspector. "I was horrified. Suddenly I was at a desk, nine to five, Monday to Friday. It was like death. But I got used to it, of course."
After a spell in Templemore as a superintendent he served with the first Garda contingent in Cyprus, before becoming assistant commissioner in Sligo when the new regional commissioner posts were set up by the last government.
There he dealt with subversive activity on the Border and the BSE crisis, when the Garda tried to stem the flow of cattle across the Border.
Mr King says he did not always plan to leave the Garda when his 30 years' of service were complete. "But maybe, subliminally, I was thinking: after 30 years what are you?"
He studied at the Irish Management Institute and took a master's in management science at Trinity College, while improving his French and German.
Peers in the force have worried that he is sometimes too intense. "He doesn't promise that something will be done as well as possible. He guarantees it will be done, and I think doing that he puts himself under a lot of pressure," says one.
Mr King disagrees. "I only guarantee what I know is possible. If it can't be done, I'll say so."
He says he does not feel under stress from his own approach to work. "I'm probably a stressor rather than a stressee."
In what probably seems a terribly Californian approach, Mr King says he is leaving the Garda partly for self-improvement. "That's Maslo's theory, you know? Everybody can develop to be more of what they are.